Will the Korean Pop Culture Boom Have Legs?

A month ago, on a riotously lovely morning in Orange County, California, I stumbled into perhaps the most convincing display I’ve yet encountered of the potency of hallyu – a Korean term that literally translates as “The Korean Wave.”

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I’d been invited to be a panelist at KCON ‘12, which billed itself as “the first-ever large scale convention dedicated to the hottest entertainment coming out of Korea.” The event was conceived of and organized by the cable channel MNET America, the U.S. branch of the hugely popular Korean music network that might be called the “MTV of Korea” (except that MTV is in Korea and MNET is way bigger).

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Psy, performing at the American Music Awards in Los Angeles on Sunday.

I’ll admit that my initial response was skeptical. Even as I accepted the invitation to speak, I suppressed a nagging fear that MNET was forcing into existence something that wasn’t there, trying to engineer a need among K-Pop fans to gather as a collective from the top down, rather than letting it spring up from the grassroots.

It’s a concern that worried the executive who spearheaded the event, too. “We knew that the fandom was out there. We’d seen these fan gatherings spontaneously manifest at other events we’d sponsored,” says Ted Kim, EVP and U.S. chief of MNET America’s parent company, CJ Entertainment America. “But we were struggling, because it’s very hard to get good data when it comes to phenomena like this. You’re just not able to quantify things. And at some point, you just need to make a leap of faith.”

That leap entailed booking the Verizon Amphitheatre in Irvine, California, for an event that combined workshops about organizing fan clubs and breaking into K-Pop, karaoke showdowns and dance-offs, autograph sessions, food trucks and merchandise booths and a grand-finale concert featuring some very attractive young people and a Technicolor SFX lightshow that could probably be seen from space.

“We kept on debating about how many people we should expect,” says Kim. The number they finally hit upon was 10,000. “We thought to ourselves, if we can get that many people to come out for this, well, that’s wildly successful. That’s fabulous validation that the fandom does exist and that they do want to gather together. But I’m going to say right now that there was tremendous nervousness. Behind the scenes, we were secretly whispering, ‘What if throw the biggest party in the world and no one shows up?’”